Articles

In its current form, cap-and-trade amounts to a system that interferes with development patterns in the South to offset carbon emissions resulting from “business as usual” in the North. Politics should be seeking alternatives to the trading model, argue Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young.

Dominant discourses of sustainability, argues Ingolfur Blühdorn, remain firmly within the growth paradigm, their hegemony being a reflection of the exhaustion of the critique of industrial society and consumer capitalism. For any genuine turn towards sustainability, the limits of rights and freedoms widely held to be sacrosanct must be re-politicized, and their content and limitations redefined.

While freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment, there has never been an awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. Whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions that work like boundary parameters of human existence.

Committed, critical writing in Denmark has long since left the domain of literature and turned to genres such as documentary film and journalism, writes Andreas Harbsmeier. As it emerges from its sheltered existence in a reservation, recent Danish literature is collapsing the boundaries between the literary field and the broader public sphere.

The fundamentalist justification for ecological politics is outdated, writes Jürgen Trittin, chairman of the German Green party. The ecological reform of the global economy must bring on board those with no interest in preserving nature per se. The more radical, “nature-oriented” and naive a demand is, the less likely it is to be realized and the more catastrophic the consequences will be.

Global warming, if left unchecked, will undermine development, overtax social capacities and endanger international stability. Progressive policy must focus on “managing the unavoidable” and “avoiding the unmanageable”.

Combining feminist and ecological approaches, ecofeminism opposes the domination of the white male over women, over the poor and over the natural world. Virginie Maris surveys epistemological, moral and social forms of the ecofeminist critique, drawing conclusions about the association between reductionist science and paternalist capitalism.

Climate policy is heavily dependent on expert scientific opinion, with the IPCC the leading authority. Yet uncertainty surrounds the science of climate change, and in particular the 2° target. Does politics’ reliance on inexact science disqualify its decisions? And does scientists’ involvement in politics prejudice their objectivity? Not necessarily, writes Åsa Knaggård.

Daniel Knorr’s work can described as a conceptually inflicted practice of very immateraial ideas, write curator and critic Dieter Roelstraete. “His is an art predicated on the immediate experience of the irreducible materiality of all thought, on the crafty mining of those ideas that lie dormant in matter, clutter, stuff.”

“Histories” means many things, but above all that the history written in western Europe does not necessarily coincide with the one the eastern Europeans are trying to write, observes Biancamaria Bruno in her essay about her first visit to the Lithuanian capital.

The Czech communist party might be an anachronism, but to ostracize it only prolongs its existence. Whether irrational or calculated, anti-communism in the Czech Republic distracts from more pressing problems, writes Marek Seckar.

Slovak society has overcome its historical handicaps and became a fully-fledged EU member-state. Yet the style of resolving conflicts among Slovak political elites undermines conditions for future development.

The notion of abandoning the East for the sake of a brighter western dominates the Polish memory of ’89, writes Wojciech Przybylski. Renewed debate among the born-free generation about the period of change would foster a more individual cultural identity

The figure of the German in recent Polish literature reveals shifts in perspective from the experience of war to that of exile and resettlement. Representations of the German other in Polish self-imagining.

Bosnian Serb war criminal Biljana Plavsic is to be released from a Swedish prison later this month after serving two thirds of an 11-year sentence. Slavenka Drakulic notes that Plavsic’s “confession” in The Hague was nothing but a staged farce.

European stability is threatened less from outside than from within, argues Samuel Abrahám. Does the EU possess a strategy for dealing with the type of illiberal politician gaining ground in the Visegrád Four nations?